Search Content

Displaying results 4351 - 4400 of 87950

Anthro Blog Carnival

The thirty-fourth Four Stone Hearth blog carnival is on-line at Our Cultural World. Archaeology and anthropology be da shit, trudat! The next open hosting slot is on 9 April. All bloggers with an interest in the subject are welcome to volunteer to me. No need to be an anthro pro. Also, don't miss the brand-spanking-new Skeptics' Circle.

New Online Magazine: Inkling

A couple of the women behind Inkycircus have decided to launch a new online science magazine, called Inkling. As they put it, their mission is: [to] cover the science that pervades our life, makes us laugh, and helps us choose our breakfast foods. If you like the stuff you see in Seed, you'll find similar things in Inkling. Check it out.

Acting! On the web!

Are you a voice talent? Want to participate in an online drama? Sign up for a part in a podcast recreation of parts of the Dover trial. It should be fun, if you're into that kind of thing. I'm not volunteering, I'm afraid. I can't act, and I'm also afraid that the closest match to my voice would be Michael Behe, and I'd die of mortification.

An open letter to 0.7%

This got published a while back in the Walrus, but I just noticed that it's also now freely available online. 0.7%, in case, you're not aware is the hallmark figure suggested by Pearson as a target for foreign aid to developing nations. Anyway, hope you enjoy. My favourite line, by the way, is: You're Wilco playing to the High School Musical crowd.

The God Delusion by Dawkins

The God Delusion is the new book by Richard Dawkins. Readers of Dawkins would already know Dawkins position on religion. Beebs has an interview with Dawkins in it's Newsnight programme. You can watch the video online. Quite interesting. Prospect Magazine has a review which is worth a read if you want to see the kind of reactions that Dawkins evokes in some people.

Required Reading

OmniBrain has a funny post on the secret of antigravity. The Neurophilosopher has a interesting post on how neuropathic pain could be treated with menthol, which activates cold receptors. The American Scientist Online publishes an interview with Marc Hauser on his model of an inborn moral system. Sounds suspiciously like repackaged Kant to me, but worth the read. (Hat-tip: Thinking Meat.)

Framing Science in N.C., Redux

I was pleased to learn that our North Carolina session has been by far the most watched online--see here--so I decided to post the video. In addition, the chair of our session, the able Abel Pharmboy, has a long post summarizing what went down, which in turn prompted lots of follow up comments. If you haven't read that yet, definitely check it out.

Top 100 Mental Health & Psychology blogs

This blog is included in a list of Top 100 Mental Health and Psychology Blogs, compiled by a site called Online University Reviews. The list is divided into a number of categories - general, cognitive and forensic psychology, psychiatry, neuroscience, addiction, anxiety, autism, bipolar disorder and depression. Many of the sites listed are already on my blogroll, but a few of them are new to me.

Tangled Bank #64

The latest Tangled Bank is online (a little bit late) at Neurophilosophy. My notice is a little bit late, too, but in one of those odd coincidences, it's because I'm in London…as is this week's host, and I met him at the natural history museum yesterday. Better late than never, and just in case you haven't read it already, head on over.

Video Analysis tutorial with Tracker Video

Previously, I showed how to analyze a cat video with Logger Pro. Logger Pro is nice, but so is Tracker Video. I also posted a comparison between Tracker and Logger Pro. Now, here is the same tutorial on the same video using Tracker Video. Record your screencast online I am not going to go through the analysis, since it would be the same as with Logger Pro.

If Physical Books Are Dead in Five Years, How Do the Poor Find Books? Whither (or Wither?) the Library?

As the slow-motion destruction of our nation's infrastructure continues due to deficits über alles hysteria, we find this very depressing article from Camden, NJ about the proposed eradication of its public library system: Camden is preparing to permanently shut its library system by the end of the year, potentially leaving residents of the impoverished city among the few in the United States unable to borrow a library book free. At an emotional but sparsely attended meeting of the library board Thursday, its president, Martin McKernan, said the city's three libraries cannot stay open past…

My picks from ScienceDaily

What Do Squid Hear? Scientists Learn How Sensitive The Translucent Animals Are To Noise: The ocean is a noisy place. Although we don't hear much when we stick our heads underwater, the right instruments can reveal a symphony of sound. The noisemakers range from the low-frequency bass tones of a fish mating ritual to the roar of a motorboat. The study of how underwater animals hear is a growing topic in marine science, especially with regards to naval sonar and whales. Improved Estrogen Reception May Sharpen Fuzzy Memory: Estrogen treatments may sharpen mental performance in women with…

LugerFest 2009: Ed Brayton, Isis, and the legendary 40 oz porterhouse

Each summer, the fair City of New York plays host to a cosmic convergence of bloggers within the ScienceBlogs.com corral. It's a great time to meet all the folks we know very well online, but perhaps not IRL. Moreover, we had a really nice reader meetup last year where - thank you very much - all four of you came to see me, including Dr Val of Better Health and Peter Frishauf, Medscape founder. The planning for this summer's gathering has led to the two following posts. One is a throwing-down-of-the-gaunlet by Isis the Scientist to Ed Brayton, challenging him to a duel over the 40 oz…

How Twitter Made Me Into A Citizen Journalist

I awoke this morning at 5:50 am because of a nightmare, only to hop online and find out another one had occurred in Chile. An 8.8 magnitude earthquake had struck. Ten minutes later, the first tsunami warning siren sounded. It was deafening. I remember when I was a little kid growing up in Hawaii Kai, there was a tsunami warning. In the end the water only raised by a few inches. In the past few months since I'd started my PhD, there have been a couple other tsunami watches, none of which resulted in anything of interest. But there's something about a haunting siren at 6 am that makes you…

University of Georgia Starts Project for Free Wiki Textbooks

I was kind of wondering when they would start something like this. For the uninitiated a Wiki is an online text that anyone can edit. It has links within it to other articles forming a web on constantly changing information -- sort of like an encyclopedia only better. The most famous Wiki is Wikipedia -- which I think is a wonderful resource, but since it is based on the premise that anyone can edit it can sometimes have notable errors. Anyway, some professors from the University of Georgia are trying to applying the idea to textbooks: So, what's this Global Text Project about? It's an…

Your Friday Dose of Woo: Oxy-woo and the energized sound

In retrospect, I feel a little guilty about last week's edition of Your Friday Dose of Woo. As a couple of commenters pointed out, the guy responsible for the woo seems as though he's a bit disturbed, as evidenced by the ransom note-style literature on his website and the news story that mentioned how his family didn't take him seriously and he was divorced. On the other hand, the woo was truly top notch. As I pointed out, it also illustrated how a woo-meister can take a single erroneous idea about human physiology and run with it far beyond what anyone would think possible. Such woo can be…

Your Friday Dose of Woo: Stringing you along

Another week in the can. It's been an eventful one, with prizes won, memories revived, and a couple of pesky Holocaust deniers descending to spew their bile. Hard as it is to believe, the year's almost over and the holidays are upon us. You're probably like me, tired of the Christmas carols, commercials urging you to buy, buy, buy since late October, coupled with the frenzy of preparing for the season. After all that, Christmas is only four days away. Perhaps, like me, you would like to take a little break. And, as always, I know just the thing. It's time once again for a little bit of tasty…

Psst. Wanna buy some Iranian ammo?

Turns out Iran does make its own ammunition, duh. Question is: is that what the Pentagon showed? PS: More at Entropic Memes PPS: apparently someone at kos disputes the authenticity of diomil.ir - looked real enough, but these things can be faked. Don't know why they'd bother, it is not going to be hard to get some Iranian made 81mm rounds in the gulf, easier just to buy or confiscate them if you wanted to embellish evidence In particular the question is whether Iranian ammo would have bright yellow english language markings and Common Era dating, using US convention. Defense Industries…

sorry, it was me

so, as you may have heard, AIG, the insurance giant "lost" $61 billion and change this last quarter... welll, I found it, I think, but I can't be sure, since it could be someone else's $60 billion, I mean one big pile of used $20s looks much like another; anyway, the US taxpayers are going to cover AIG on this one, so "finders keepers", eh? and the tens of trillions in Credit Default Swaps that the major ex-investment banks are carrying on their balance sheets they're also mine, well most of them, I think Goldman Sachs got some too it was such a deal, I mean the odds were ridiculously good I…

Holocaust of the fluffy toys

We took a pile of stuff down the the dump today. I don't like throwing things away (which is a large part of the problem: thngs accumulate because I can't bear to throw them away), but it has become necessary - too much stuff has been piling up. The fluffy toys of the title weren't ours: it was someone we saw there, tipping a whole box of perfectly good toys into the skip. But but but I want to say, there must be someone who wants those... but then again, when the far east pumps out new fluffy toys at such volume at such low price, what margin is there in recycling old ones? The tip does make…

Trump Doubles Down on Immigration; Promises Tacos for Everyone

I was half expecting Trump to soften on immigration. The logic of that? His main supporters, who hate all immigrants and are a bunch of racist slobs will vote for Trump no matter what he says because the are morons. But, the fence sitters, the amoral "Good Republicans" who would vote for him because they have learned to fear Democratic economic policies (this group are also all morons) might vote for him if he was less crazy sounding. But no, that didn't happen. Instead, he embarrassed our nation buy telling the President of Mexico, to his face, that he's going to have to pay for this wall…

Best vacuum cleaner, best place to buy one

This is a blog rant. But first, a bit of blog appreciation to the select number of individuals who suggested to us that the Shark was the best vacuum cleaner for us, in a recent Facebook Discussion. I have to say, that when I saw S.H. suggest the Shark, I figured that the chances were pretty high that we would end up with a Shark, S.H. has always given me the very best advice on everything. Anyway, the main point of comparison for us was between various models of the Dyson and various models of the Shark. Side by side they ended up being pretty similar but the Shark actually has some…

Who's smarter than who?

Oh, no, I'm torn — I'm an atheist who thinks IQ tests are over-rated and over-interpreted, and here's a Danish study that claims that atheists have IQs that average 5.8 points higher than theists'. Actually, I'm lying and I'm not really torn at all. I don't buy it. I think IQ tests are loaded with bias that favors a particular kind of thinking, the kind that signals success in academia, engineering, medicine, and so forth, and doesn't necessarily reflect any specific biological property. It's fair to say that atheist values parallel the values rewarded by IQ tests, but the simple-minded…

Links for 2011-05-10

Shit My Students Write "Macbeth couldn't have loved Lady Macbeth because he was crazy and too busy hallucinating witches and stuff. Also, crazy people can't do it without going crazy midway through." (tags: academia education internet silly blogs literature) Budget Mix-Up Provides Nation's Schools With Enough Money To Properly Educate Students | The Onion - America's Finest News Source "Sources in the Congressional Budget Office reported that as a result of a clerical error, $80 billion earmarked for national defense was accidentally sent to the Department of Education, furnishing schools…

Good Stuff Going to Waste

Somewhere between yesterday's posts about uselesss junk and useful antiques, there's this. The picture to the right is a tragedy in progress, though is might not look that way: It's an FTIR spectrometer left behind by the previous occupant of my lab. It's a top-of-the-line instrument, a Bomem DA-8 spectrophotometer, and a new one will set you back better than $100,000. It's no use to me, though, as it's designed to make measurements of spectra in the far infrared-- wavelengths of a couple of microns or more, well past the 800 nm sort of range where I work. So it sits there in the lab, next to…

An apology...? Not if I ruled the universe.

The reaction to the news that the Irish Catholic Church covered up (thus encouraged) the molestation and rape of children is odd. At least odd to me. Apologize? Quit using the titles 'Father' and 'Your Grace'? Really? The people involved in this disgusting tragedy (perpetrators and those who protected them) should only have two real options. 1-- Spend their remaining lives and the entire fortune of the Catholic Church to right this wrong. Sell the Vatican for whatever you can get for it. Spend all the Churches $$ and all of their man-(nun)-power on the victims of abuse, and any suffering…

Looking for some motivating music

Now that the semester is over, I have no excuse not to do a lot of home-maintenance-y things, like: installing a rainbarrel in my backyard installing a dual-flush mechanism on our upstairs toilet setting up the other dehumidifier in the basement (we had one in each house when we had 2 houses, and hadn't set up the 2nd one in WL over the winter. However, it will soon be the case I need to empty the 1st dehumidifier every 2 days, so time to press #2 into service) picking up everything post garage sale, before the cleaners come tomorrow sorting through boxes unearthed through garage sale prep…

In 2008, the Democratic Nominee Will Be the Evangelical

The irony of the 2008 presidential race is that this time around, the Democratic nominee is by far the more religiously devout candidate, promoting a born again language and professed faith. In a match up with John McCain, it's Barack Obama who can genuinely speak the language of evangelicals, softening some of the Democratic party's "God problem." Indeed, news reports are speculating that many young Evangelical voters might break for Obama in the general election, a proposition that fits with some of the recent polling data that I have spotlighted at this blog. The Obama campaign is already…

#1 in Football and Basketball, But Left Behind in Research?

Florida and Ohio State face off tonight in the Men's NCAA basketball championship, a re-match of January's national title game in football. Both schools feature the best athletics programs that money can buy, as they each spend an astounding $100 million dollars annually on their sports programs. Yet, as I wrote back in January, though these schools might be "turning pro" in athletics, they are quickly being left behind by the elite universities in terms of investment in science and research. Ohio State will invest more than $1 billion over the next ten years in athletics. In comparison,…

From blogger to blogginghead

I'm going to be appearing this weekend on the strangely addictive show bloggingheads.tv. If you're not familiar with it, it's a show composed of two talking heads staring out of your screen at you, holding forth for an hour on whatever topic they choose (politics, television, science...). Actually, each speaker is staring into a computer camera and talking on the phone to his or her partner in chat. On Saturdays, two of our most provocative science writers, John Horgan and George Johnson, take to the tubes. Horgan asked me to join him this week. I've known Horgan for several geological eras,…

askjohnlott.org makes the Washington Times

The Washington Times has a story about a Lott related Internet impersonation, but it's not about Mary Rosh. The Washington Times considers the Lott parody site askjohnlott.org to be a more important story than Mary Rosh. That site contains answers like this: Q: I want to get roughly ten hand guns for my friend's 50th birthday party, but I really don't want the police to know about this. Is there any way for me to do this without getting reported? A: Hopefully, you haven't saved this for the last minute. By law, licensed gun dealers must report to federal…

Greenpeace Chides Retailers for Buying Bad Seafood

Yesterday, Greenpeace-USA released a report criticizing supermarkets for buying unsustainable seafood. Greenpeace-Canada also released a similar report, which I spoke about this morning on CTV news. As I said in the interview, if we want sustainable seafood to become something more than just yuppie food, we're going to have to affect behavior on a big scale and supermarkets (where, in Canada, for instance, two-thirds of seafood is sold) are one medium for doing this. One way to motivate supermarkets to change their buying behavior is through affecting their reputation with negative…

A bosom boost when you need it most?

Occasionally, I come across interesting new technologies that are just too...well, too something, not to post about them. Take, for example, Lisca lingerie's newest model: The Smart Memory Bra. The special memory foam bra reshapes under the influence of heat to give a woman more cleavage when she gets warmer. The theory is, since attraction can cause a woman to rise her temperature a bit, that the bra will enhance her best assets when the time is right. Of course, I'm not so sure I buy that. There are any number of reasons why a woman's body temp might rise, the least of which is interest in…

The "Tax Cuts For Healthcare" "plan" screws the poor more than I thought:

I made a fairly large error when I wrote my previous article on the health care "plan" that Bush will announce during the State of the Union Address later today. When I did my back-of-the-envelope calculations of the tax breaks that different people would receive under the plan, I missed an important consideration. When I initially read the press release, I thought that everyone would get the $15,000 income deduction. I wasn't reading carefully enough. In reality, only those who have health insurance will get any sort of tax break. This means that unless the uninsured poor can scrape…

The Standing of Science in America

In my latest Science Progress column, contemplating declining funding levels for university-based scientific research, I ask where science stands in America today. The answer, not surprisingly, is complicated--but also worrisome. On the one hand, people really respect scientists. But on the other, the appreciation appears to be only skin deep--there isn't the sort of engagement that would really allows them to draw upon science to better their own lives in all aspects. As I put it in one passage: ...consider a very important question for most people: Where should I buy a home? Amid the…

Your brain - on Van Aelst

Kantor Set Kevin Van Aelst Several readers have suggested I blog about photographer Kevin Van Aelst in the past weeks. If you've missed out on his work, Kevin is the sort of artist who can portray cellular mitosis in the legendarily difficult medium of Krispy Kreme, or chromosomes in gummi worm, fingerprints in non-dairy creamer, or the Kantor Set in egg yolk. His work is clever, funny, and meticulous to a fault. Circulatory System (Heart On Your Sleeve), 2009 Kevin Van Aelst Here's what the artist has to say: While the depictions of information--such as an EKG, fingerprint, map or…

The Sunday Night Poem - W. B. Yeats

[Editor's note: The narrator has been begging me for months to let him post some poetry on this site, using the argument that unless we promote the world's greatest poems, the collective I.Q. of this country is going to drop to the level of people who buy books by O. J. Simpson. Out of respect for his opinion and feelings I have decided to allow the C. O. to share a poem every Sunday night. Here is his first offering.] He Wishes For The Cloths Of Heaven Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths, Enwrought with golden and silver light, The blue and the dim and the dark cloths Of night and light…

Mystery beast washes ashore in Devon, UK

The Sun and Mail are reporting the discovery of a mystery beast washed ashore in North Devon, speculating that it could be the fabled Beast of Exmoor. By most accounts, the Beast of Exmoor is a big cat such as a puma that escaped or was released onto the remote moors in the 1970s and has lived there ever since, preying on livestock. No real evidence has ever been found, save blurry photographs and unconfirmed sightings. The Sun reported this new development: The Sun rubbishes claims that this might be a seal, pointing out: "The Marine Conservation Society and the National Seal Sanctuary…

RIP Planktos

Some days are really good and today is one of them. Rick at MBSL&S informs us today that PLANKTOS is no longer. Ah Planktos, we hardly knew ye. Last week, the board of directors for San Francisco-based Planktos, a company selling carbon credits through the dumping of iron filings into the ocean, indefinitely postponed activities. Which is press release-speak for it folded. Their website is down, and one can only assume the Planktos team is selling their Aeron Chairs on eBay. But man, if the arrogant bastards at Planktos didn't get off one last salvo at the scientific community that didn'…

Those who forget history…

Denyse "Buy My Book" O'Leary explain How the Darwinists help the ID guys, citing the example of Paul Mirecki (as described by Johnny Wells): Anti-Christian zealots are often in the forefront of attacks on intelligent design. In 2005, the chairman of the University of Kansas Religious Studies Department, atheist Paul Mirecki, proposed to teach a course titled “Intelligent Design Creationism and Other Mythologies.” Mirecki boasted on a web site that “fundies” would see the course as a “slap in their big fat face.” He also endorsed a description of Pope John Paul II as “a corpse in a funny hat…

Space, the forgotten frontier

The End of the Space Age: It's important to recognize, though, that the decision in question belongs to all of us, and not just to Barack Obama. The administration wouldn't be cutting the manned spaceflight program if Americans were still enthusiastic about going to the stars -- if space exploration still occupied a privileged place in our imagination, if our jocks still wanted to be astronauts and our nerds still wanted to build rockets. Obama is simply bowing to our culture's priorities: Our geeks want to build a better XBox, and our jocks want to buy it to play Call of Duty: Modern Warfare…

Identity Politics

We shouldn't be surprised when every presidential election - even an election between two candidates committed to some vague post-partisan future - veers into identity politics and the culture war. I can't help but watch these conventions through the lens of Jane Goodall, as a gathering of social primates affirming their role within the tribe. Politics is an emotional sport, defined by teams with visceral identities, and not some rational arena in which issues and analysis take center stage. Of course politics always degenerates into some version of Us versus Them: that's just human nature.…

The digital future, freedom & control

Why 2024 Will Be Like Nineteen Eighty-Four: The power to delete your books, movies, and music remotely is a power no one should have. Here's one way around this: Don't buy a Kindle until Amazon updates its terms of service to prohibit remote deletions. Even better, the company ought to remove the technical capability to do so, making such a mass evisceration impossible in the event that a government compels it. (Sony and Interead--makers of rival e-book readers--didn't immediately respond to my inquiries about whether their devices allow the same functions. As far as I can tell, their terms…

NSF AST: we hear ya, bro

Anyone want to buy some telescopes? Heavily used. Free to a good home. The NSF has issued a preliminary response to the NSF Astronomy Portfolio Review. Game on. NSF MPS/AST Response to Portfolio Review Report (pdf) This is a 4 page response from NSF Astronomy Division Director Ulvestad to the Portfolio Review, from August 31st 2012. Implementation is pending current budget negotiations for next fiscal year budget and plan. Implementation requires acting by end of 2013. Small Grants: "...Given the constrained budget scenarios and the explicitly higher-priority recommendation for AAG and…

A Chateau Steelypips Thanksgiving

The Thanksgiving advice from Making Light got here too late to do us any good, but we had a fine first Thanksgiving anyway. My parents, sister, grandmother, and one of my great-aunts came up from New York, and Kate's parents came up from Boston, so we packed nine people into our smallish house, along with more food than we really needed. But then, Thanksgiving is a quintessentially American holiday: built around excess. What other country would come up with a holiday whose principal observation is gorging to excess, and then watching football on tv? So the turkey was a little too big-- that…

Amway sells genetic tests?

From Emily Singer's article yesterday in Technology Review: A number of companies offering direct-to-consumer genetic testing have cropped up in the past two years to capitalize on these advances, from 23andMe and Navigenics, which offer genome-wide scans to identify specific disease-linked genetic variations, to Knome, which offers whole-genome sequencing to the wealthy. Any doubts that personal genomics is making its way into the mainstream can be assuaged with a look at Interleukin genetics, a startup that sells genetic tests for heart-disease risk, B vitamin metabolism, and other factors…

Science Mag on Science Blogs

You know what they say about great minds. In the April 14 issue of Science Magazine, two environmental scientists opine that scientists can, and must, become active bloggers and readers of blogs, for two main reasons. First, hard-blogging scientists will ensure that sound scientific information makes it to a wide public audience (while by shunning blogging, the scientific community will cede the conversation to other voices and other interests). Second, scientists have, in the blogosphere, an unprecedented tool for sharing and soliciting ideas, data, and hypotheses. A blog-literate scientific…

Local blogging - what's new

On Thursday night I went to the Chapel Hill-Carrboro blogger MeetUp. Actually, I did not plan on going - my wife was out of town and I had kids on my hands on a schoolday, so I told Anton in advance that I would not be coming this time. But, the previous day both of my kids bugged me about some online stuff, asking me how certain things are done and I had no idea how to help them! I promised I'd ask my blog friends. But then, I had an Eureka moment and asked my kids if they would rather ask my blog friends in person! They were quite enthusiastic about it so we went all three of us to Open…

ScienceOnline2010 - introducing the participants: SciBlings

Continuing with the series of posts introducing the participants - you can see the whole list here. A couple of dozen SciBlings will be there, but here are five I picked for today: Janet D. Stemwedel (aka Dr. Free-Ride) is a Philosopher and a Chemist. She is a Professor of Philosophy at San Jose State University in California and she blogs on Adventures in Ethics and Science and can also be found on Twitter. Janet is the veteran of our conferences - one of a handful to attend her fourth, and one of only two people who did something - a talk, presentation or session - every single year. I…

Framing Global Warming

NPR has started a year-long series on climate called Climate Connections. The other day, they broadcast the first in a series of their educational segments, starting at the very beginning: the carbon atom. You can read the intro here and watch the video here but just listening to the audio in the car was absolutely fascinating (the video is close, but much shorter and not identical to the first quarter of the audio segment for which the podcast is at the "listen" button). The science was very basic yet completely correct and the entire segment was so fun to listen to. It was fast and…